The much publicised attempt to clone Australia's Tasmanian tiger back from extinction has been scrapped, the Australian Museum says.

Australian Museum director Frank Howarth and assistant director science and collections Dr Les Christidis say the quality of the DNA is too poor to work with.

They say while the museum has sufficient expertise to try to construct a DNA library it lacks the facilities and skill to conduct "further stages requiring cell culture".

The cell culture stage of the project would have been necessary to enable cells from other specimens to act as hosts for parts of the reconstructed genome.

"The museum's future involvement in the thylacine project has been re-evaluated," the museum said in a statement to ABC Science Online.

"In fact, further investigation has now revealed that the thylacine DNA is far too degraded to even construct an DNA library.

"Given this the project cannot proceed to the next stage."

The ambitious project to clone the thylacine from a preserved pup made headlines around the world when it was launched in 1999 by the museum's then director Professor Mike Archer, who is dean of science at the University of New South Wales.

Archer's contract as museum director ended in 2003 and with his departure he says the project has lost steam.

Howarth and Christidis say the evaluation of the thylacine project followed the appointment of the museum's new management team in 2004.

In a statement to ABC Science Online Archer says he is personally disappointed by the museum's decision not to proceed with the project.

But he says he still hopes it might be possible to bring the thylacine back to life.

"I and other colleagues remain interested in the project and I don't think that it will simply die because the museum can't proceed," he says.

"The technology to make it happen is improving all the time. And I believe science has a duty to continue to assemble the building blocks that will be needed to do it."

Archer says the technology for recovering degraded DNA and extracting it from museum specimens was advancing.

He says DNA extracted from dried specimens may be just as good, if not better than, that from the preserved pup, and genetic material had already been obtained from three of the museum's dried specimens.

A helping hand?

Archer says he has also received the backing of leading US genomic expert Dr Craig Venter, a key figure in the sequencing of the human genome and founder of the J Craig Venter Institute.

Venter met Archer in Sydney late last year and offered some suggestions about how to proceed as well as offering collaboration in the thylacine project.

There had been widespread speculation about the future of the thylacine project since Archer left the museum to return to the University of New South Wales.

Archer earlier acknowledged the project was "in a go-slow phase" and says another institution, such as the University of New South Wales, may need to take over leadership of the project in future.

He says commitment to the project has waned since his departure from the museum.

The last known living thylacine died in captivity in 1936, on Australia's southern island state of Tasmania.